.

THE HEIR.
In 1617, twenty and some years after the horrible night during which Etienne came into the world, the Duc d'Herouville, then seventy-six years old, broken, decrepit, almost dead, was sitting at sunset in an immense arm-chair, before the gothic window of his bedroom, at the place where his wife had so vainly implored, by the sounds of the horn wasted on the air, the help of men and heaven.

You might have thought him a body resurrected from the grave.

His once energetic face, stripped of its sinister aspect by old age and suffering, was ghastly in color, matching the long meshes of white hair which fell around his bald head, the yellow skull of which seemed softening.

The warrior and the fanatic still shone in those yellow eyes, tempered now by religious sentiment.
Devotion had cast a monastic tone upon the face, formerly so hard, but now marked with tints which softened its expression.